And War Shall Teach Them
by Oedipus Tex
Summary: In the space of a telephone call, the entire history of their relationship. War-story. Of a sort. Roy and Madame Christmas story. Rated for creepiness of subject matter.


In case you haven't already heard, I don't own Fullmetal Alchemist.**  
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**Warning: **Implies sexual abuse of a minor.

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**And War Shall Teach Them**

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Once upon a time, when evolution had been forward, he had heard pleasing things. Roy-boy, child, rascal. But this was all he heard now: _My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? _

How strange, that even a land could make that cry.

_My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? _

How it echoed! How it reached down, into the deep places. How it plunged into the hearts of the observant and the profane alike. Over there, there, and here too: Into the hearts of the Ishvalans, into the hearts of the Amestrians, and even into the heart of Roy Mustang. Four months ago, Roy would have laughed to scorn anyone who suggested he was capable of such an act. But now, he was capable of anything, here in the sands of Ishval.

A man was capable of anything, when Death was staring him in the face. Here, it was in the shape of a war-ravaged sand country of red-eyed devils and bomb bunkers blown out, of cities crumbling into sand. It was an inferno that started small, just a pinprick in Roy's hand, which then swarmed like a hornets' nest in a mumble and rage. It was blood, and it was war.

And how it affected the men! What would they be, after feasting on each other? The sanitation officers told Roy he was probably jaundiced, but since they couldn't prove it, he should eat more vitamin C. The privates drew crosses on their fingers, to bless their souls and their aims. Then they cried for their mothers, every one of them. Roy didn't have a mother, but his fingers tingled and his eyes felt too wide, stretched until they tore. He was so scared, he couldn't eat, so he couldn't even vomit this taste out of his mouth of sand and bitter acid and fuzzy teeth. He came to a decision one day. He decided to reach out to the woman he had sworn never to forgive—even over the _other woman_ in his life—because this was the one that betrayed him. And he was really going to do it. He was going to call Madame Christmas.

(His own intimacy was so close he couldn't make one thought go in a straight line to the other, and nothing was in order.)

One didn't make a phone call easily in Ishval. Telephones were sacred and scarce. There were plenty of battlefield phones, but telephones that connected back home were almost unheard of. Ishval was a backwards country where, for the war effort, the natives chopped down telephone poles like _freaking-drunk _lumberjacks. Roy had never even been in a camp that had one, but then he came to a new camp. At the last one, he went to see the medic because his fingers were rubbed raw and bleeding, but beside bandages and salve, the medic prescribed four days' rest from the war. So Roy was shipped out to a quieter camp off the front lines, all because of the look in his eyes. He wasn't surprised to see it was full of wounded. Perhaps his pride would have been hurt, except at this new camp, there was a telephone, _for personal use_. He could scarcely sit still long enough to fill out his paperwork and eat his dinner before he went looking for it. It was night and he didn't know his way around, but he eventually came upon the little communications tent, lit in lamplight glow. He inquired, but learned the only way you could use the phone was if your wife was having a baby or something. Roy didn't have a wife.

"What if my aunt was having a baby?" he asked the communications tech on duty.

The warrant officer—that's all she was, but she had all the power in the relationship—held a wet rag to her forehead and smiled. She looked so comfortable basking in the hum-and-glow of the communications equipment that Roy was panged by jealousy. What a job! Apparently, the job was to keep the phone away from schmucks like him, because the warrant officer purred, "Nice try, Major."

Roy _was_ a major and a State Alchemist to boot, but she didn't care. He had learned the look of a dissipated woman: one that painted her lips into thick red strawberries, and plucked her eyebrows thin and curving, like greyhounds running full-tilt above her eyes. She had been here for months, maybe even years, and was so war-weary she didn't care about kids frightened out of their minds. Roy's wrists itched to look at her lips, as if he could feel such lips again, and how they would press.

He asked, "What if my aunt was dying?"

"You said she was having a baby."

"She's dying in childbirth, is what!"

She laughed, unnervingly. Her red hair, wet with water and who-knows-what-else for the smell, stuck like a web to her neck. "How many cigarettes you got on you?"

"I don't smoke."

"Neither do I, but that's the way it is, isn't it? You know, they barter for cigarettes in prison too." She looked pleased with herself for having drawn the comparison.

"This is a misuse of military resources."

Her mouth opened into a lazy smile of hard teeth. "I'm following orders," she said. "_You're _trying to break them, kid, so don't piss around with me. You're not getting the phone unless it's an emergency."

He modified his tone: "It's just I'd rather not keep combustibles on my person."

"Oh, so you're _that_ one then!" Her brows leapt, and suddenly, that disinterested look vanished. "The Flamer Alc—"

"Flame!"

"Alchemist, yeah." She tilted her head, and then pushed out her hand and put it on his stomach. "So that makes you real good with your hands."

Roy's stomach hardened, even as her hand sank and a nest of bees formed underneath it. The bees broke free and scattered throughout his body, into his organs and bones, and clogged in his veins—he was a gridlock of bees. He should have seen this coming.

She smiled when he reached down and took her hand, and pressed it. He smiled too, but not for the same reason she was. It was because she was asking a favor for a favor, but it wasn't the same level of favor. Roy rather thought he was getting the raw end of the deal.

Slowly, she stopped smiling, and tried to pull her hand away. He held it tight. "You're hurting me!"

"Do the officers around here really do _that_ do talk to their aunts?"

"Stop it!"

"Who's your CO?"

That was how Roy got the telephone. The war was teaching him how to wait until he saw weakness, and then pounce on it and rip/tear/shred it apart and reform it to his own will, until what's left was quivering and thanking him for his mercy.

The warrant officer made quick work with the switchboard, getting him to a civilian operator in East City, and then left without looking him in the face. Roy waited until he was sure he was alone to put the phone against his ear. The operator was there, pronouncing her syllables carefully, "Number, please?"

Roy told it to her and then hung up, to wait for her to call him back once she made the connection. He had probably ten minutes or so, ample time for him to think. And he thought, _Has it really been over a year_? A year since he had last spoken to his aunt? He called her a few months ago to let her know he was being deployed, but it had been a little more than a year ago since he had last spoken to her face-to-face. He would never forget it. He had stood before her with a new pocket watch and rank, and told her he had a new name now, better than the one that spoke of their shared heritage. He had taken dark delight in how her cigarette burned down a quarter way before she thought of something to say. "The last few years have been rough—" she said. And he said, "No worries, I'm just living up to your expectations." It was the only clue he had given her for the backwards evolution of their relationship.

After all, they never spoke of _it_. Instead, they pretended it was about their earlier disagreement. Madame Christmas hadn't wanted Roy to go into the military in the first place: when he told her he was thinking of it, her lips pulsed out fat and spongy, as if to say, "_Such a child!"_ Her business had her seeing into the intimate-ugly parts of the male psyche, and the military men were the worst of the offenders. As far as Roy had seen it, women had hurt him far worse than what the military ever had. They argued: he spouted the words of the recruiter at her, and she laughed and called him naïve. But after a month, she said, "I won't stand in your way. This is the second time I've done that. Will this change things between us?" He answered, "You only let me go to Hawkeye's because I was so angry and it was easier."

Roy jumped when the phone rang. A sweat broke out along his knuckles that had nothing to do with Ishvalan heat, but he answered it anyway.

"Sir?" the operator said. "Your call is connected."

Roy almost hung up. He could reach out at a time when he wasn't so frightened and half-mad, when Christmas wasn't so busy—she was probably doing the payroll, or kicking out a patron for treating the girls like prostitutes. They _weren't_ prostitutes, even if sometimes they—the other voice he knew was on the line said, "Roy!"

It was her.

Roy was transported back those years (12), to the hours when Christmas had found out. She had walked in on him in the shower (such an innocuous thing to have such impact), and the evidence had been there on his skin. He tried to hide it, but she wormed a confession out of him right there, with the water falling on his shoulders and the curtain covering his lower half. Maybe because he had told her so stolidly, she thought the worst. The worst was, after firing her employee, she called Roy into her office. Roy had entered, afraid, ashamed, and so tender, and she had blown out a mouthful of smoke and said, "I thought it'd be a few years before I had to worry about you."

Her profession made her think the lowest of men, and he was becoming male.

"Roy Roy Roy!" she said.

Roy ached for the days when Christmas had called him "Roy-boy." "Roy-boy" was when he had still been young enough to sit on her knee while she played poker. She had always held a fan of cards in one hand and a glass of gin in the other, but when she sipped her drink, her elbow would brush his side and send such a thrill into him. "Roy-boy" was back when he still valued her opinion, so much so, that when she went on a long trip to Drachma and told him to obey the girls, he did it. Even when he got sick in the lungs. Even when he was in bed, barely able to breathe. Even when the new girl came in, and said if she rubbed cream on his chest, he would feel better, but started with his stomach.

Now, Christmas was calling him, rasping through the phone, "Roy? Are you there? Roy?"

He swallowed and readied himself to say what he had called to say: "I'm sorry and I'm scared and I think we should talk and I'm scared please help me I apologize I apologize _help me_ I want it back the way it was." But he couldn't speak. He couldn't even make a gurgle in his throat.

"Roy? Roy?" Christmas's concern cut through 200 miles of scratchy line. She sounded frantic: "Roy Roy Roy!"

He looked at the lights blooming in the city of tents beyond him, thinking about what he had written in the sand, when he had waited for the medic to see his fingers:

_My God_

_My God_

_my god my god_

_Why have you forsaken me?_

He pressed his mouth into the telephone, and said, "I just. . . ."

"R-Roy? What—"

"That woman . . . she really hurt me."

Christmas breathed hard into the phone.

"I was just a kid." He reached forward and dimmed the lamplight shining into his eyes. "_This _isn't fair. What you said hurt too."

He waited for her response.

"God have mercy," she breathed. "Roy—"

He hung up. He did it quickly, letting the click of the hook overtake the reedy sound Christmas made. He had done as much as he could do, for now. He stood in the tent, and trembled. _Okay_, he thought. _Now I've said what I wanted to say_.

He felt weirdly elated, as if his joints were loosening and sliding away from each other, opening up pockets of liquid-and-air within him. This war was going to destroy him. And it was making him too strong. When it was over, he was going to rush back to Madame Christmas, his hard and soft aunt, his _foster mother_, to recover from this war that made him strong but will also make him a mewling, crushed, burnt-out ash pile, like the end of a cigarette. But he will be strong enough to talk to her and forgive her, and they will talk again and laugh and do favors and mince words and crush each other with hostile affection. And their relationship will continue to evolve, but it will always do so backwards.

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**A/N:** Many thanks to **Antigone Rex** for helping me out with this. Brilliance, thy name is **Antigone**.

P.S. Does anyone else find the relationship between Mustang and Mustang a bit . . . not strained, but still, unusual? Like there's a History (capital H) there?


End file.
